New Website Calendar

Over the holiday season we’ve tested and implemented a completely new calendar system for the WDBC website which will bring about some new features which we feel will make the calendar even more useful to WDBC members this year! Instead of the posts/plugin system we were previously using, we are now using a public Google Calendar which is displayed on the website using a plugin. So what does this mean?

• More flexibility: Using Google Calendar to store the events in the back-end gives us greater control and flexibility on how we can use events.
• Looks nicer and loads faster: The new plugin we are using to display upcomming events on the homepage and the full calendar works much more nicely than the old calendar (the old calendar had a few bugs/display issues), also navigating around the calendar will update without refreshing the whole page, so its faster as well.
• View from your personal calendar or smart-phone device: Since the Google Calendar is a publicly shared calendar, it’s easy to add the calendar to your Outlook/iCall or view upcoming church events directly from your smart-phone device such as your iPhone or Android phone.
• Anyone can easily add/update church events to the public calendar: Anyone (who we give permission to) can easily add new events or modify existing events on the public calendar. This means ministry or event leaders can easily manage their events on the calendar on their own and will help the WDBC calendar to be more up to the minute accurate and complete.

So for example, I added the WDBC public calendar to my iPhone, and now I can see both personal events on my default calendar and upcoming WDBC church events, you can see in the screenshot below how the different colour dot shows that the events are from different calendars.

WDBC Public Calendar added to iPhone Calendar

If you are interested in what makes up the new calendar system on the website, more information Google Calendars is available here, and the WordPress calendar plugin we are using is the All-in-One Event Calendar.

Check out the new WDBC Calendar here, or if you want to add the shared public calendar to your Outlook/iCal or smartphone device check out the section in the frequently asked questions here. Since this is a new calendar, we would love to hear your feedback, so let us know in the comments below on if you are finding this useful or if you have any issues or questions you need us to look into.